Creating rich WebRTC applications with Kurento

Or why you need a media server for the cool WebRTC stuff

WebRTC is a disruptive media technology bringing real-time multimedia communications to HTML5 standards. WebRTC is currently available for billions of users as a built-in feature of common browsers such as Chrome and Firefox. This makes possible the emergence of a truly open and interoperable technology competing with proprietary conferencing solutions and enabling developers to create specific-purpose WWW peer-to-peer real-time media applications in a simple and seamless manner.

However, WebRTC developers commonly require more than plain peer-to-peer video conferencing. For this, we introduce Kurento, a Free Open Source Software (FOSS) initiative build on top of GStreamer providing developers a set of high level abstract APIs making possible the creation of HTML5 multimedia-enabled web application. Kurento pushes GStreamer to a next level building a media server with interesting features such as media recording, media mixing for group communications, media adaption and transcoding, media augmentation, integration with computer vision capabilities, etc.
In the talk we will introduce what’s Kurento and how WWW developers can take advantage of it showing the following aspects of the framework:
•First, introducing Kurento Java and JavaScript APIs and we explain how they interact with the signaling plane in an application server. This allows WebRTC application developers to create their application logic using popular technologies such as Java EE or Node.js.
•Second, by presenting a unique media plane written on top of GStreamer. GStreamer is based on the concept of media pipelines, which can be seen as chains of media elements performing operations to a media flow in real-time. Currently there are more than 1000 media elements written for GStreamer implementing many different capabilities such as codecs (e.g. H.264, H.263, VP8, etc.), recorders and players (for storing/recovering media from files), blenders (for augmenting media), filters (i.e. face blurring, face recognition, etc.) and others. Hence, Kurento enables to inject WebRTC streams into a chain of such elements and perform, in real time, the operations the developer wishes.

To demonstrate the capabilities of Kurento, this talk will also present some advanced demos and examples showing augmented reality and computer vision capabilities applied on top of real-time video-conferences